Sorry, joost, no it doesn't at least, not in all cases. I am having the same issue. xorg.conf has no corepointer settings or mouse settings in Serverlayout section. Maybe that's an issue? Tried using xorg.conf.original and xserver doesn't start. Tried using xorg.conf.sabayon, doens't work either.

After including that synaptics policy in hal restarted X and then tried rebooting. No joy.

I know it's a bit late to be posting about this, and probably most people affected by this problem have resolved it, but I thought I'd add my experience regarding this problem on a SL 3.5 installation that has had various packages updated via Entropy and Portage (I also updated the kernel to 2.6.27 using genkernel) over the last couple of months. (I know it's not a stock SL 4.0/4.0-r1 installation, but the problem with the touchpad appears to be identical or very similar to what people experienced with 4.0/4.0-r1.)

I found that a USB mouse still worked perfectly on my Acer TravelMate 8215WLMi laptop, but the touchpad no longer worked at all (it was neither possible to move the cursor nor possible to select via tapping). I tried all the various fixes posted in the SL forums and the only thing that worked in the end was the following:

1) Edit /etc/make.conf and add the line INPUT_DEVICES="evdev keyboard mouse synaptics" (as the current line INPUT_DEVICES is commented out and has too many devices).2) emerge -C x11-drivers/synaptics (I had to do this, as this package was blocking the installation of x11-drivers/xf86-input-synaptics and the touchpad was not working with it, even with the various suggested fixes)3) emerge -1v x11-drivers/xf86-input-synaptics4) Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add the following line:

I made only one change to the file /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/11-x11-synaptics.fdi: I uncommented the line regarding input.x11_options.SHMConfig as shown below, although I believe this makes no difference to the ability to tap on the touchpad:

Anyway, I can again use the touchpad to move the cursor, tap once to select, tap twice and drag to scroll, and also two-finger-scroll vertically. As x11-drivers/synaptics is not installed any more and x11-drivers/xf86-input-synaptics is installed, I assume the two drivers are incompatible. Does anyone have any idea about this? KSynaptics no longer works, though, and trying to re-merge it fails. Anyway, everything else appears to be working correctly. It seems that the various synaptics software and the way functionality is apparently shared between xorg.conf and /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/11-x11-synaptics.fdi is a real mess. Also, why are there two synaptics drivers (x11-drivers/synaptics and x11-drivers/xf86-input-synaptics)?

yeah, synaptics driver was heavily modified so that most of the configuration is no longer handled by Xserver, but by HAL, hence the new HAL policy that needed to be added to enable scrolling/tapping.

This tripped up a lot of folks (me too). The upgrade didn't go so smooth. But that's ok, it's an easy fix. In some cases (mine) synaptics driver was actually removed without being reinstalled. So that through me for a loop as the new hal policy had no effect (because of course, there was no driver to control the mouse).